Category Archives: Staff profiles and activity

computation and culture, EAVI, Inspiration, News, Staff profiles and activity

Major funding for next-generation tech that adapts to human expression

Computer scientists at Goldsmiths, University of London have been awarded more than £1.6m to lead an international team in accelerating the development of advanced gaming and music technology that adapts to human body language, expression and feelings.

The success of first generation interfaces that capture body movement, such as the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinect, has demonstrated a public appetite for technology that allows users to interact with creative multimedia systems in seamless ways.

The Rapid Mix consortium will now use years of research to develop advanced gaming, music and e-health technology that overcomes user frustrations, meets next generation expectations, and allows start-ups to compete with developments from major corporations, such as Apple, Google and Intel.

Rapid Mix will bring cutting-edge knowledge from three leading technology labs to a group of five creative industry SMEs, based in Spain, Portugal, France and the UK, who will use the research to develop prototype products.

Newly developed Application Programming Interfaces (the tools that allow software to interact with another programme) and new hardware designs will also be made available to the Do-It-Yourself community through the open access platform.

Rapid Mix is led by Professor Atau Tanaka from the Department of Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, with Dr Rebecca Fiebrink and Dr Mick Grierson.

Professor Tanaka comments: “Humans are highly expressive beings. We communicate verbally but the body is also a major outlet for both conscious and unconscious expression. In this quest for expression we’ve created art, music and technology.

“Technological advances have their greatest impact when they enable us to express ourselves, so it logically follows that new, disruptive innovations need interfaces that take advantage of our expressivity, rather than acting to restrict it”.

“Microsoft has promised a Kinect 2 that detects heart rate to assess gamers’ responses, but small European businesses struggle to compete with the corporations when it comes to getting amazing products from the lab into the public’s hands. Our project aims to overcome this challenge and get new technology directly to users, where it will have true impact.”

Inspiration, News, Staff profiles and activity

Prof Mark Bishop in The Independent

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Ex Machina (film still)

Mark Bishop, Professor of Cognitive Computing at Goldsmiths features in The Independent with an article about the limits of Artificial Intelligence.

He outlines three arguments that address the question of consciousness and computing. The first, by John Searle, dates from 1980 and is known as the Chinese Room; if a computer convinces a Chinese speaker that it understands Chinese by responding perfectly to their questions, it has passed the Turing Test. But does it really understand Chinese, or does it only simulate understanding? The second is Bishop’s own argument from his 2002 paper, Dancing With Pixies. “If it’s the case that an execution of a computer program instantiates what it feels like to be human,” he says, “experiencing pain, smelling the beautiful perfume of a long-lost lover – then phenomenal consciousness must be everywhere. In a cup of tea, in the chair you’re sitting on.”

This philosophical position – known as “panpsychism” – that all physical entities have mental attributes, is one that Bishop sees as Strong AI’s absurd conclusion. Shadbolt agrees. “Exponentials have delivered remarkable capability,” he says, “but none of that remarkable capability is sitting there reflecting on what very dull creatures we are. Not even slightly.”

The third argument Bishop makes is that there’s something about human creativity that computers just don’t get. While a computer program can compose new scores in the style of JS Bach, that sound plausibly like Bach compositions, it doesn’t design a whole new style of composition. “It might create paintings in the style of Monet,” he says, “but it couldn’t come up with, say, Duchamp’s urinal. It isn’t clear to me at all where that degree of computational creativity can come from.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/alex-garlands-film-ex-machina-explores-the-limits-of-artificial-intelligence–but-how-close-are-we-to-machines-outsmarting-man-9996624.html

Mark Bishop’s profile at Goldsmiths:
http://www.gold.ac.uk/computing/staff/m-bishop/

computation and culture, Events, Inspiration, Staff profiles and activity, Women in Computing

Transmediale 2015 – Capture All

smart-city

Transmediale is a Berlin-based festival and year-round project that draws out new connections between art, culture and technology.

The activities of transmediale aim at fostering a critical understanding of contemporary culture and politics as saturated by media technologies. In the course of its 28 year history, the annual transmediale festival has turned into an essential event in the calendar of media art professionals, artists, activists and students from all over the world. The broad cultural appeal of the festival is recognised by the German federal government who supports the transmediale through its programme for beacons of contemporary culture.

At the ‘Predict & Command: Cities of Smart Control’ event featured our very own Sarah Kember, Professor of New Technologies of Communication at Goldsmiths. Her work incorporates new media, photography and feminist cultural approaches to science and technology. Experimental work includes an edited open access electronic book entitled Astrobiology and the Search for Life on Mars (Open Humanities Press, 2011) and ‘Media, Mars and Metamorphosis’ (Culture Machine, Vol. 11). Her latest monograph, with Joanna Zylinska, is Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process (The MIT Press, 2012). Kember is in the process of setting up The Goldsmiths Press – a digital first University Press.

This particular conference addressed ‘post-digital urban life’ where every thing as well as every relation between things and subjects are potentially quantifiable and addressable, and thus rendered operational in a new way for economical and cultural (trans)-actions.

Questions which were raised included: What situations and relations of control over self, work, leisure and everyday life are emerging in the paradigm of the Smart City? What is the role of art in pushing such developments forward and/or resisting or altering their course? And how does civil society respond to these developments, for example in the form of citizen driven ways of outsmarting this new urban situation of technological ubiquity?

http://www.transmediale.de/

 

Events, MA/MFA Computational Art, MSc Computer games and Entertainment, News, Staff profiles and activity

Colliding Worlds

william_Latham

Professor Arthur I Miller and William Latham in conversation:

7:00pm, 10th February, 2015

Shoreditch House
Ebor St, London E1 6AW

Professor Arthur I Miller of UCL will be at Shoreditch House to explore exactly how cutting-edge science is redefining contemporary art, the subject of his latest book ‘Colliding Worlds’.

Arthur will explain the new and exciting era of digital contemporary art as artists strive to depict the wonders of our age of information – take a look at huge data sets worked aesthetically, sculpting with sound, folding together concepts of art with physics, using living matter to manipulate inert materials into new and beautiful forms, and artists who are striving to investigate what changes chip implants, gene transplants, and 3D printed organs make to our idea of what it is to be human.

Following his presentation Arthur will be in conversation with the pioneering computer artist Professor William Latham of Goldsmiths College.

If you would like to attend email Professor Arthur I Miller: a.miller@ucl.ac.uk

computation and culture, Inspiration, Staff profiles and activity

Michael Cook, named by Forbes in their Top 30 under 30

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Michael Cook, Researcher from the Department of Computing was named by Forbes in their Top 30 under 30  list. Mike is currently “making a creative AI called ANGELINA that can design its own original games.

Michael Cook is a PhD student at Imperial College in London, where he also studied for an MEng Computing. He’s also a Research Associate at Goldsmiths College’s Computational Creativity Group.

For his PhD project he asks questions like: Can we evolve entire games from nothing? Can we start with literally nothing at all, except a few basic ideas about what a game contains, and ask a computer to design levels, populate them with characters, and wrap it all up in a ruleset that is both challenging and fun?

Find out more:

Games by ANGELINA: http://www.gamesbyangelina.org/

Forbes in their Top 30 under 30 : http://www.forbes.com/pictures/mlg45ehell/michael-cook-27/

Goldsmiths College’s Computational Creativity Group: http://ccg.doc.gold.ac.uk/

EAVI, Events, Inspiration, Staff profiles and activity

Atau Tanaka, Fiducial Voice Beacons: Action @ Science Museum Lates

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Wednesday 26th November 

20.00 – 20.20 and 21.00 – 21.20

@ Information Age gallery
Science Museum, Exhibition Road, SW7 2DD London, United Kingdom

Information Age is a newly opened gallery within the Science Museum which celebrates more than 200 years of innovation in communication and information technologies. Artist Atau Tanaka has been invited to respond to the newly commissioned artwork for the gallery, Fiducial Voice Beacons by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Fiducial Voice Beacons is an interactive sound and light installation consisting of beacons situated within the ceiling of the Information Age gallery. Each beacon stores sound recordings that can be heard by visitors using an app on their mobile device. The sound recordings are voice messages that relate to information and have been collected from scientists, poets, artists and thinkers from the past and the present. Visitors are invited to interact with the artwork and to record their own messages thereby replacing the existing ones and producing a quasi-living archive.

In Lozano-Hemmer’s artwork the audience enjoy the relatively personal experience of listening to the audio content through headphones or the speaker on their hand-held device. Atau Tanaka, together with Rebecca Fiebrink, Steph Horak and Adam Parkinson (members of the Embodied Audiovisual Interaction (EAVI) research group) will present two unique performances that transform the usually localised listening experience of the work into a shared, collective event. Tanaka’s performance the installation will be “played” by the performers with the use of smartphones that are plugged into a sound system, creating a moment where the sound of the beacons is rendered palpable to a larger audience.

This event has been organised by MFA curating students from Goldsmiths, University of London.